Participate in GEO-CAN Assessment of Christchurch

EERI members now have the opportunity to assess damage caused by the recent earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, by using an innovative online tool to analyze imagery — the Tomnod Disaster Mapper. This cooperative effort is the result of EERI’s partnership in GEO-CAN (Global Earth Observation-Catastrophe Assessment Network). The mapper was developed by Tomnod (www.tomnod.com) with ImageCat (www.imagecatinc.com), the creator and major partner of GEO-CAN.

Simple by design, the mapper streamlines the GEO-CAN image analysis process. To participate, visit http://tomnod.com/geocan/?source=eeri. You will be able to search for, label, and quantify damage in buildings and areas of liquefaction. Each participant adds a small piece to the complete picture, resulting in a crowd-sourced solution that is obtained quickly, accurately, and easily through the web-based portal. The mapper leverages existing commercial cloud infrastructure to manage massive datasets and corresponding metadata with structured, searchable databases.

The platform includes training examples of the various damage states specific to the Christchurch event. You can take the tutorial, and once completed, sign up. You will be assigned a grid. Multiple people will be assigned to the same grids, so that comparisons can be made about the accuracy of the analyses. This professional development opportunity will improve your skills in remote sensing analysis and will help determine the potential of high-resolution aerial imagery and the technology’s future applications in damage assessment.

In addition, geotechnical engineers will be contacted to participate in a liquefaction study. Remote sensing experts will be invited to analyze satellite imagery (as opposed to the high-resolution aerial imagery) to determine differences in the assessments. If you would be interested in participating, contact Marjorie Greene at mgreene@eeri.org.